Towards Tactile Wireless Multi-Hop Networks : The Tactile Coordination Function as EDCA Supplement

A Comprehensive Survey of the Tactile Internet: State-of-the-Art and Research Directions

“…Another insight on WLAN and WBAN resource allocation is that none of the studies has addressed the reliability aspect that is also critical for Tactile Internet applications, as discussed in Section II.C. We note that although most of the proposed algorithms rely on contention-free mechanisms [138] [140][141] to avoid packet collision, packet loss can still occur due to erroneous transmission caused by excessive path loss, given that packet dropping occurs mainly due to buffer overflow [139] [143]. The lesson we can infer from this is that the reliability aspect of the WLAN and WBAN technologies must be further investigated in order to fulfill the Tactile Internet reliability requirement.…”

“…To achieve low latency and high reliability, most of the studies (e.g., [138][140] [141]) rely on contentionfree mechanisms to eliminate packet collision. However, packet loss can still occur due to the packet dropping caused by buffer overflow [139] [143]. Therefore, an interesting research avenue is to design efficient buffer management mechanisms to be used in conjunction with the underlying channel access algorithm in order to meet the ultra-high reliability requirement without compromising the delay for the tactile traffic.…”

“…This approach could be extended to further consider Tactile Internet requirements. 4) Routing: D2D communication over wireless multi-hop networks is another potential solution for realizing Tactile Internet requirements [139]. It can avoid the need to transmit tactile data through congested core networks or through direct communication in wireless networks over long-distances, thereby improving the latency and reliability performance.…”

“…Similar to [138], Engelhardt et al [139] aim to enhance the existing IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol for the Tactile Internet. More precisely, the authors investigate the feasibility of achieving a 1 ms end-to-end latency in three-hop wireless networks by means of a proposed tactile coordination function (TCF) to complement the widely deployed HCF of the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) mechanism of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol.…”

“…Six works have proposed novel resource allocation algorithms for WLANs and WBANs in the context of the Tactile Internet. Four of them focus on WLANs, aiming to either propose an efficient mechanism to enhance the existing IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols (i.e., HCCA, EDCA) [138] [139] or to design novel MAC schemes [140] [141] to meet the strict Tactile Internet requirements. As for the other two works targeting WBANs, the enhanced SmartBAN MAC protocol is proposed in [142], and an efficient resource allocation framework is proposed in [143] for haptic communications over WBANN.…”